20 Marketing Tips Every Entrepreneur Should Know!

Let’s start with an old adage: the most important order you ever get from a customer is the second order. Do not forget to market to your customer base as well as new prospects.

With Internet marketing, spend 10 percent of your time or more on testing; make sure your great marketing idea reads through to the customer.

Knowing your competition and adapting to consumer motivation and behavior is not an option. It is an absolute necessity for competitive survival.

A well-designed Pinterest site can hold all your products, videos, testimonials, blogs and inspirational pictures in one place all leading back to your website.

Using a properly designed social media network and a functional business website can replace the old fashioned Yellow Pages.

Be ever alert of your internet reputation. Know the power of repetition. Be sure your message is consistent. Employ reputation management.

The two most common mistakes companies make in using the phone is failing to track results and tracking the wrong thing. Involve your CRM and website in all sales calls.

Internet marketing activities should be efficient, consistent and not just sales ads. Build your reputation and trust while fishing for prospects.

It costs five times as much to sell a new customer as an existing customer. Nurture your customer base with consistent updates, newsletters, and offers.

Selling 100 percent of the time in all things marketing can gradually lead to low open rates of your emails, web promotions, and webinars. Remember, give your customers something first; become an information source. Then they are your friend and selling becomes secondary.

You must entice your prospects to enter your website and then be prepared to wow them! Don’t think that product superiority, technology, innovation, or company size will sell itself.

New prospects are great, but they are not customers until they buy from you. You must pay attention to your present customer base, in order to build new business; a happy customer base will help you build reputation, trust and new prospects.

Remember, when you build your social media branches and the information parts of your website, stress how you can improve a situation or problem. People don’t buy products, they buy the benefits and solutions they believe the products provide.

Direct mail campaign can cost $1.25 per piece or more and give less than 1% results. Putting that same campaign cost into a great social media campaign and email newsletter will reach far more people with far less cost per hit.

The average business never hears from 96 percent of its unsatisfied customers. Actively look for unsatisfied customers and become a problem solver. 40 percent of unsatisfied customers note no one ever contacted them after the sale.

50 percent of those customers who complain would do business with the company again if their complaints were handled satisfactorily. Pay attention to your customer base.

You love to get those testimonials and compliments; we all do. But it is estimated that customers are twice as likely to talk about their bad experiences as their good ones.

Have a talk with your staff, building a good customer base is a gallant cause and will increase business. However, marketing is everyone’s business, regardless of title or position in the organization.

If your product is a great answer to an accounting concern, don’t claim it will sharpen the pencils too. Exaggerated claims can produce inflated expectations that the product or service cannot live up to, thereby resulting in dissatisfied customers.

Target marketing is the key and will lead to much greater results. Get to know your prime customer type—the 20 percent of product users who account for 80 percent of the total consumption of that product class.

Bonus: Remember that good marketing is bringing your product or service to light with potential customers. If you over sell in the marketing, sales has nowhere to go. Marketing’s job is to excite prospects about the virtues of the actual product you sell.